They call him the Oracle. He's got 46 years under his belt and more hash marks than a football field. More importantly, he has a crew of cops to look out for on the streets of Hollywood. From his understaffed office at Hollywood Station, he keeps a close eye on his squad who spend their day in patrol cars, and their nights in the underbelly of a city that never sleeps.

Hollywood Crows: A Novel

When Nate and Bix Rumstead (a supposedly upstanding cop with serious sobriety issues) find themselves caught up with bombshell Margot Aziz, they think they're just having some fun. But in Hollywood, nothing is ever what it seems.

Hollywood Moon: A Novel

There's a saying at Hollywood station that the full moon brings out the beast--rather than the best--in the precinct's citizens. One moonlit night, LAPD veteran Dana Vaughn and "Hollywood" Nate Weiss, a struggling-actor-turned cop, get a call about a young man who's been attacking women.

Hollywood Hills: A Novel

LAPD veteran "Hollywood Nate" Weiss could take or leave the opulence, but he wouldn't say no to onscreen fame. He may get his shot when he catches the appreciative eye of B-list director Rudy Ressler, and his troublemaking fiance, Leona Brueger, the older-but-still-foxy widow of a processed-meat tycoon. Nate tries to elude her crafty seductions, but consents to keep an eye on their estate in the Hollywood Hills while they're away.

The Black Marble

He is a damned good cop -- a burned-out homicide detective wrapped around a Smith & Wesson .38 and a vodka bottle. She is his partner -- twice divorced, nursing a grudge against men, obsessed by the awful temptation of love.

The Choirboys

Partners in the Los Angeles Police Department, they’re haunted by terrifying dark secrets of the nightwatch - shared predawn drink and sex sessions they call choir practice. Each wears his cynicism like a bulletproof jockstrap - each has his horror story, his bad dream, his night shriek. He is afraid of his friends–he is afraid of himself.

Harbor Nocturne

When Dinko Babich, a young longshoreman, delivers Lita Medina, a young Mexican dancer, from San Pedro Harbor to a Hollywood nightclub, their lives are forever changed. An unexpectedly tender and moving love story develops among the cops and criminals who occupy the harbor, and soon Dinko and Lita are caught up in terror and peril through no fault of their own.

Floaters

Mick Fortney and his partner Leeds manage to cruise above the standard police stress - pools of coffee and Pepto-Bismol - they're water cops in the "Club Harbor Unit", manning a patrol boat on San Diego's Mission Bay. A typically rough day's detail consists of scoping out body-sculpted beauties on pleasure craft, rescuing boating bozos who've run aground, jeering at lifeguards, and hauling in the occasional floater who comes to the surface.

Finnegan's Week: Mysterious Press - HighBridge Audio Classic

Fin Finnegan, a San Diego police detective and wannabe actor heading straight for a midlife meltdown, is assigned a routine truck theft that turns into a toxic chemical spill, setting off a bizarre chain reaction of death and murder on both sides of the Mexican border. Fin is forced to team up with Nell Salter, a sexy female investigator, as well as an equally fetching U.S. Navy investigator who wants to learn all that Fin can teach her - and that’s saying a lot

The Glitter Dome

In his finest, most compelling blend of wild humor and powerful drama, Joseph Wambaugh leads us into the Hollywood scene to demonstrate the effects of that heady, amoral world on four sets of police partners enmeshed in the glamour and the grime, the hustle and the horror. They live and work in a dizzying mix of moguls and starlets, elaborate parties, outrageous and sordid actions; a place where sex and drugs are open and the big deals are undercover.

Lines and Shadows

Each night, thousands of immigrants stream north across the Mexican border towards San Diego, hoping to make a new life in the United States. Along the way, many find death instead. Bandit gangs roam the moonlit desert, robbing, raping, and killing these desperate, impoverished migrants. For decades Dick Snider has watched this happen. Now, in 1976, he’s decided to end the bloodshed. A San Diego cop with an intimate awareness of the trials of border crossing, Snider has uncommon sympathy for the immigrants.

Fugitive Nights

Joseph Wambaugh returns to glamorous Palm Springs and its ever-mysterious desert to give listeners a suspense novel rich in astonishing plot twists, fascinating characters, and the penetrating humor for which he is famous. Three mismatched people - one of whom is a police officer - become involved in the trail of an elusive and dangerous fugitive on a secret mission.

The Onion Field

Hollywood. Saturday night. A broken taillight leads to a routine traffic stop. It shouldn’t have changed the lives of the four men involved, but it did. The Onion Field is the frighteningly true story of a fatal collision of destinies that would lead two young cops and two young robbers to a deserted field on the outskirts of Los Angeles, towards a bizarre execution and its terrible aftermath.

The Delta Star

In death she looks 35, but Missy Moonbeam, a.k.a. Thelma Bernbaum, is only 22 when the cops of Rampart Division find her flattened on the sidewalk. A Nebraska farm girl, Missy came to Los Angeles to act, and died not long after her dream did. The detectives assume that her pimp threw her off a roof - but they couldn’t be more wrong. Missy had a trick at Caltech whose name draws the Rampart detectives into a bizarre conspiracy.

L.A. Rex: A Novel

As far as everyone in the squad room knows, Ben Halloran is completely fresh to the streets of the 77th Division - just a soft kid from the West Side who's decided to become a cop and happened to draw the hardest neighborhood in L.A.

The Blooding

Fifteen-year-old Lynda Mann's savagely raped and strangled body is found along a shady footpath near the English village of Narborough. Though a massive 150-man dragnet is launched, the case remains unsolved. Three years later the killer strikes again, raping and strangling teenager Dawn Ashforth only a stone's throw from where Lynda was so brutally murdered.

The Barrakee Mystery: An Inspector Napoleon Bonaparte Mystery, Book 1

Why was the redoubtable King Henry, an aborigine from Western Australia, killed during a thunderstorm in New South Wales? What was the feud that led to murder after nineteen long years had passed? And who was the woman who saw the murder and kept silent? This first story of Inspector Napoleon Bonaparte, the half-aborigine detective, takes him to a sheep station in the Darling River bush country where he encounters those problems he understands so well... mixed blood and divided loyalties.

The Lost Get-Back Boogie

Released from prison after two years for manslaughter, Iry heads to Montana for a fresh start on a ranch owned by a prison buddy's father. He also hopes to nail down a song he's been working on, unable to get quite right. But soon new troubles bring tragic consequences, and it will take a lot more than a soulful tune to ease the pain.

Rules of Crime: A Detective Jackson Mystery, Book 7

When a call from his daughter, Katie, interrupts his much-needed vacation, Detective Wade Jackson knows it’s bad news. His ex-wife, Renee, has disappeared and Jackson heads home to discover she’s been kidnapped. That same weekend, a young University of Oregon student is brutally beaten and dumped naked at the ER. As Jackson teams with FBI Agent Carla River to retrace Renee’s movements and handle a high-tech, fast-moving ransom demand, Detective Lara Evans must identify the young assault victim, then track down the assailant with no leads to go on…except the whispered rumor of a secret sorority.

Special Operations: Badge of Honor, Book 2

Facing a desperate public, a hostile press, and reluctant witnesses, the Philadelphia Police Department must try and stop a new reign of violence - a terrifying spree of kidnapping and assault that has plunged the city into fear.

Laundry Man: The Jack Shepherd International Crime Novels, Book 1

Once a high-flying international lawyer, a member of the innermost circles of government power, Jack Shepherd has abandoned the savage politics of Washington for the lethargic backwater of Bangkok, where he is now just an unremarkable professor at an unimportant university in an insignificant city. A lawyer among people who laugh at the law, a friend in a land where today’s allies are tomorrow’s fugitives, Jack Shepherd battles the global tide of corruption, extortion and murder that is fast engulfing the new life he has made for himself in Thailand.

Darkside

When a midshipman plunges six stories to his death, the U.S. Naval Academy begins investigating an apparent suicide. But there's a bizarre twist: the young man's body is found wearing undergarments belonging to Midshipman Julie Markham, a senior at the academy.

The Old Silent

In the tenth murderous case for Richard Jury, the New Scotland Yard superintendent witnesses a killing in a West Yorkshire inn called the Old Silent, while his highborn, amateur colleague, Melrose Plant wishes to he could perform one as he drives his impossible Aunt Agatha to the Old Swan in Harrogate.

Casca the Eternal Mercenary: Casca Series #1

This is audiobook #1 in the Casca Series. When they flew Casey into the hospital at Nha Trang, the medics were sure he would die. That he didn't was only the first surprise. The second, and bigger one, was that Casey had been fighting for two thousand years, ever since that day on Golgotha when he thrust his lance into the side of the man on the cross.

Publisher's Summary

The Grand Master of the police procedural returns to the Los Angeles Police Department in a gripping new audiobook about life in one of the more sensational police forces.

They call him the Oracle. He's got 46 years under his belt and more hash marks than a football field. More importantly, he has a crew of cops to look out for on the streets of Hollywood. From his understaffed office at Hollywood Station, he keeps a close eye on his squad who spend their day in patrol cars, and their nights in the underbelly of a city that never sleeps. As they make their way from the drug dens to dirty street corners, a string of seemingly unrelated events lures the cops of Hollywood Station to their most startling case, reminding them that nothing is too horrific or extreme for Los Angeles.

In his long-awaited return to the LAPD, Joseph Wambaugh takes his listeners on a raucous ride through the streets of Los Angeles and into the heart of the LAPD, where no one's safe from the gritty city - especially the cops.

Great listen/book. Believable intertwined plots, and Adam Grupper's reading is superb;very fluid and his instant use of different voices for the different charcters gives the reading a "movie" type feel. GOOD JOB ADAM!!

The first chapter of this book is VERY off-putting. Two supposedly older cops talking in surfer/valley girl accents that nearly drove me crazy, dude. Also, I thought might be a collection of vignettes from one LAPD division, but it was more than that. Eventually, all the threads come together and the crime/investigation unfolds before your eyes. Classic Wambaugh style. It is a pretty good listen.

I was a little bothered by the somewhat overdone narration for some parts, but the overall story kept me listening even when the narration was not very good. I wouldn't rate it up there with Wambaugh's best or even second-best, but it's okay.

If you've liked Wambaugh in the past, just get passed the first, oh, 20 minutes or so and you'll be hooked...like really, dude.

Mixes anecdotes about the daily life of a LAPD street cop with a story line to make this an interesting read. As an ex-consultant for the LAPD who rode around in police cars with the troops, I can attest to the authenticity - periods of routine and boredom punctuated by moments of sheer terror relieved by the "black humor" of the streets. I liked the read. It's not destined to be a classice but if you like cop stories, you'll like this book.

This book is so boring its not even funny. Its a collection of little stories that tries to shock or impress, but completely fails to do so. So the book is fragmented, and comes across as reporting disconnected snippets. But to be fair, I couldn't get past the second hour - may be it will get better. However I cannot stand to hear more to find out... Give it a miss!

I have to agree with the other reviewer who talked about this book getting off to a slow start. I was not impressed with the depiction of the characters or the different plots as they began. Towards the middle of the book the pace and character development and pace picked up but it never got to any great level of satisfaction for me. The end felt rushed, predictable and anticlimactic. As usual Adam saved the book with his presentation. It is a good book if you are in to cop stories about cops without a true "mystery" in the works. At the end of the day, had I bought this book in paper form I would have tossed it out after the first chapter.

I tried to get into this book and failed. I enjoyed Wambaugh's book The Onion Field. However, this is about two surfer cops and criminals that don't have a single redeeming act or thought. Human beings aren't entirely good or evil. I like characters that are flawed, not something scraped from the bottom of a dumpster.

I had forgotten how much I enjoyed Wambaugh's ability to bring his characters to life. I typically don't like fiction, but his characters and stories seem based on real events and people and I actually feel like I am learning something along with enjoying the story.

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